Wrong Church? No--Wrong Gospel

Much thinking and reading of late (much of what follows I owe to the work, among others, of Dallas Willard and Leonard Hjalmarson) and I'm increasingly convinced: as much as we have a church problem, we have a Gospel problem.

The church piece we know well: traditional, attractional church don't work no more.  Nor do denominational structures that reflect such a paradigm.  What we haven't acknowledged nearly as much--and this surprises me now that I'm aware of it--is the extent to which our ecclesiastical challenges are rooted in a common understanding (more to the point, misunderstanding) of the Gospel.

Typically, the church has embraced one of two versions of the Gospel.  By no means are they mutually exclusive, but one does tend to be privileged over the other.

The first is a Gospel of Atonement: in accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, your sins are forgiven, you receive the gift of eternal life, and your salvation is assured.  This understanding of the Gospel is primarily about the individual--an individual's relationship with Jesus Christ and an individual's salvation.  Discipleship is less of an issue because the primary focus is on the profession of faith in Christ and forgiveness of sins (“I’m right with Jesus…why do I need discipleship?”).  To the extent it is pursued, discipleship is seen as a primarily individual behavior done for the benefit of the individual.  Not surprisingly, in this understanding of the Gospel, the purpose of evangelism is to win souls and make new Christians.

The second is a Gospel of the Kingdom: people can live now in the Kingdom of God, a vision of what life can and should be in all its dimensions and a way of life that can help bring it into reality.  This understanding of the Gospel is primarily about others because, as Leonard Hjalmarson points out, the Kingdom of God is inherently relational (Kingdom implies relationship with the King, with fellow citizens, with the community in which you live, with standards of justice and mercy), missional (it propels us into mission in response to God’s call to be part of the Missio Dei and in the name of expanding the Kingdom) and monastic (it calls us to shared spiritual practices in community, such as worship, prayer, and reconciliation).  Here, the purpose of evangelism is to make disciples--in line, obviously, with the Great Commission and the fact that, in the Gospels, Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God more than anything else.

It should not be news that the version of the Gospel a church embraces will be reflected in the structure, ministry, and assumptions of the church itself.  The Gospel of Atonement will tend to result in a church focused on the needs of the individuals in the pews: ministries will be about self-development, worship will be focused on individual experience, the locus of church life will primarily be the church building, and mission and outreach will be a personal prerogative.  In other words, a Gospel of Atonement will pretty much result in a traditional, attractional church.

A Gospel of the Kingdom of God, on the other hand, focused on others, will tend to result in a church focused on the community and growth of the Kingdom: ministries and worship will reflect an over-arching concern for the Missio Dei, the locus of church life will be outside the church building, and mission and outreach will be the organizing principle of all the church does.  A Gospel of the Kingdom of God, therefore, will pretty much result in a missional/incarnational church.

Clearly, I'm generalizing. Exceptions can be found.  But there is, I believe, a fundamental truth at work here, and it has great significance for the missional/incarnational paradigm.  Any church wishing to be a missional/incarnational church would be well-served by first making sure everyone involved understands and embraces a Kingdom of God Gospel.  I'd even go so far as to say it's a necessary first step, and that's coming from a pastor helping to lead a church down the road to missional that didn't get the Gospel straight first.  In retrospect, I'm realizing how different (dare I say easier?) the journey thus far would've been had we taught the congregation a Gospel of the Kingdom of God to begin with.  In that case, all this change wouldn't be in service to something new and untried (what the heck is missional anyway?) but in service to what Jesus pretty clearly preached is God's intent for God's people and God's church.

If you die tonight, where will you go? It's the favorite evangelical question.  It's also the wrong one.  The right question is, If you don't die tonight, what are you going to do tomorrow?  And the right answer is, “Trust Jesus with all of my life because the Kingdom is now.”

   

I Volunteer--I'm Missional!

I had a church member come to me not long ago and say, "Enough of the missional stuff already.  I get it.  It's time to move on. Tell me something new."  You've got it?, I asked.  "Yeh," she replied.  "A lot of people in this church spend a lot of hours volunteering.  We understand about being missional."

A number of responses came to mind at that moment.  But the look on her face, the tone of her voice...my pastoral spidey senses told me to smile, say thank you for letting me know how you feel--and no more.  So that's what I did.  But as much as I might disagree with her, I understood where her comment came from, and it had less to do with her understanding of missional than with what I surmise to be her understanding of the Gospel.

A consequence of Christendom's domestication of the Gospel is making it first and foremost about personal salvation.  It is about that, of course.  The Gospel is the promise of the restoration of right relationship between Creator and created and the promise, to those who profess the Lordship of Christ, of eternal life.

But that's not all it is--not, I'd argue, even the half of it.

The Gospel is also about the Kingdom of God, about God's will being done on earth, among the living, before the immortal disposition of ones' mortal remains even becomes an issue.  It's about Jesus' radical vision of life as God intends life to be right here, right now, for all God's children.  As much as the Gospel is about atonement, in other words, it is about the existential realities of life lived day-in and day-out in a broken world.

But when the Gospel is understood primarily in terms of individual salvation, then the missional impulse inherent in the Kingdom of God becomes expressed as add-on behaviors, adjuncts to what the Gospel is really about, which is saving souls.  Behaviors like volunteering--an important, eminently worthwhile thing to do--because they are an expression of outreach, become evidence that one is "missional."  But that's rather like dancing a polka and claiming you're German.  Missional is not something you do.  It's something you are. It isn't a set of behaviors or way of talking that you embrace.  It is an epistemology, if you will--a way of understanding what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ and fundamentally reordering and restructuring every area of your life accordingly.  It is inherently relational, inherently other-centered, inherently sacrificial, because when Jesus explained what it meant to follow him, he made it clear: we are to die to this world to live for him and the Kingdom, which is to say for others...to pick up our cross and follow.

To the extent the Gospel is about us as individuals, it is in service to something much bigger than any one person: it is in service to the Kingdom.

The because-I-volunteer-in-the-community-I'm-missional church member is part of the ongoing challenge of helping lead a church from traditional to missional/incarnational: striking a balance between the need to keep a missional/incarnational paradigm in front of the congregation on a regular basis with the need to avoid annoying those in the congregation who think they "get it" to the point that they tune-out altogether.

But that's a topic for an upcoming post.